Cruel Summer: A Photo Essay on Mass Tourism in Florence

The Florentine summer is scorching and saturated with tourists. In Camilla Fatticcioni’s images, the Cradle of the Renaissance appears as a circle of hell, transfigured amid psychedelic gelato and stalls hawking its own icon. The fleeting pleasures of the classic “Italian summer” flatten the historical and artistic identity of so many cities across our peninsula.

Per me si va ne la città dolente,
per me si va ne l’etterno dolore,
per me si va tra la perduta gente.

Through me the way into the suffering city,
through me the way to the eternal pain,
through me the way that runs among the lost.

Dante Alighieri, Divina Commedia
Inferno, Canto III (1–3)

A gelato melting on the asphalt, a crowd in Piazza della Signoria, a souvenir shrink-wrapped in plastic that gives off a sense of suffocation — exactly the way the crush of tourists feels on the ground. And then trash, and lines to get into a museum under a blazing sun. Overtourism in pictures, you might say.

The photographic project Cruel Summer, begun in 2023, is still ongoing and aims to extend its inquiry to other Italian cities. The work was shown in 2023 at the Rifugio Digitale gallery in Florence as part of a group exhibition, published by Perimetro.eu, and exhibited at the Fondazione Studio Marangoni in dialogue with Common Sense, the work of the celebrated British photographer Martin Parr, a master at probing consumer culture.

Camilla Fatticcioni started with the Tuscan capital because it’s the city where she has lived for years now, and the one she has watched change as it bends to mass tourism — a phenomenon we all know by now to be global in scale. Places have always undergone change, and in the end they have always absorbed new things, and rightly so; but recent years have brought new models for managing visitor flows that ought to be put into practice.

The problem is when a tourist dystopia is passed off as inevitable change for the majority of the people who actually live in a city year-round.

Then there’s the matter of low added value. Tourism jobs are often underpaid, because so many of the services involved add little value, and the employment they create stays precarious.

Growth driven by tourism risks being essentially a benefit for the few, set against the whole population of a place — the population that bears the brunt of the strain on local resources.

The “touristification of the economy” describes a precarious growth model that rewards private rent-seeking and offloads the negative externalities onto the public — a textbook case of neoliberal logic: profits for the few, losses for everyone else.

In the end, we need a deeper reflection on “hit-and-run tourism” — one that starts from who the Florentines are who built the community we’re part of, and above all from the Florence they will leave to those who come after.

Camilla Fatticcioni’s “Cruel Summer”

Florence has become unlivable for locals and is besieged by the tourist, who is instead catered to in a city that has changed to welcome him and coax him into spending.

“Through these images Florence appears drained of its authenticity, swallowed up by the phenomenon of overtourism, which has long since become a problem of global scale. A leading role in this transformation has been played by social networks, which fuel and push the culture of the image to its extreme.

Today everyone wants the same slice of Florence, and we’re witnessing a flattening of experiences driven by an unbridled appetite for consumption that wears the city down, turning it into a parody of itself,” Camilla told FUL Magazine.

“For this project — which I’ll soon extend to other Italian cities under siege from hit-and-run tourism — I drew on Martin Parr’s direct gaze at the everyday reality of consumption, full of contrasts thrown into even sharper relief by his straight-on use of flash. My work is a critique, in particular, of the boorish tourist: the city is a victim, assailed by people who are only after the perfect image to post on social media and care little for its history and culture.”

According to EURISPES, short-term rentals in Florence alone generate a turnover of around 2 billion euros, with an annual flow of tourist tax into the city’s coffers of 71 million in 2023 (77 million estimated for 2024). Airbnb by itself paid more than 14 million in 2023, equal to 20% of what the city’s 393 hotels contributed. According to the European statistical office, Florence is not currently in the Top 10 of destinations most afflicted by overtourism — a list led by Venice and Dubrovnik.

What will be the long-term impact of mass tourism on cities like Florence, where the fleeting pleasures of the perfect, photographed vacation leave behind the mark of an inevitable cultural decline?

Photos: ©Camilla Fatticcioni